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Honor where it’s due, Part 1
By Jeremy | April 24, 2007
"Be who you is because if you is who you ain't you ain't who you is."Regular readers of this blog know that 2005 was a very difficult year for me. Professional disappointments, financial crises, family tragedies, wrongful accusations against a close friend, and the loss of Diana's nonna after an aggressive bout with cancer -- to name just a few -- conspired to raise the furnace heat seven times. By the fall of that year, after Generation Xcel's single largest funder had unexpectedly told us they were no longer funding youth agencies, pretty much everything had bottomed out and I was desperate to know what God was trying to teach me. "Consider it pure joy," James tells us, "whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything." Lack had just about overwhelmed me, leaving no choice but to persevere. Considering it pure joy was much more difficult, but sign posts along the way showed me I was on track. And it's the people who held the sign posts that I want to honor with this series of blogposts. The first was several online devotionals from Tony Sheng. On September 29 of that year, one of his blog titles asked the question: "Mt 25 -- God is...?" Matthew 25 has long been my life passage, so anything about that chapter captures my attention. I even wrote my college entrance essay on loving "the least of these" and modified the essay for law school. But Tony transcribed the parable from Matthew 25 immediately before the sheep and goats, the one about the talents. He never mentioned the least of these. Two weeks or so later he elaborated. Again, he never referenced the least of these, and instead concentrated on how we engage mission by stewarding the talents God entrusts to us. As a youth pastor for ten years, I had preached from the parable of the talents dozens of times. Yet Tony's insights caused me to have an aha moment regarding the muck and mire that entrapped me. I could never love the least of these like God requires until I first stewarded the gifts and talents He gave me better than I was at that time. The second sign post came in November 2005 at CCDA. There Lisa Cummins, a friend and advisor, made time for me to ask her how to hire her as a consultant to raise us a truckload of money. She politely looked me in the eye and said: "Jeremy, I love you and Generation Xcel, so don't take this the wrong way, but you're not ready for what we could offer you." I had a hunch where she was going with this, but I asked her to explain anyway. She did not. Instead she asked me, "If Generation Xcel closed its doors tomorrow, what would you find yourself doing?" Without hesitation, I answered that I'd love to write and speak more and facilitate other people's dreams as a consultant and strategist. Her response: "Concentrate on that for now and the rest will fall into place." There it was again. The parable of the talents, only Lisa had no idea how God used Tony to convict me about that passage a month earlier. [To be continued ...]
Topics: calling, faith, life, purpose, resiliency, talent | 1 Comment »
April 26th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
Hey J – Happy to be a small part of it all. I had no idea – that makes your story even more fun!